Norman Augustine, a board member and former chairman of Lockheed Martin, is widely known for the wit and wisdom published as "Augustine's Laws." One of his best-known maxims is that productivity, regardless of the field of effort, is concentrated in a remarkably consistent way.

Even in such diverse measures as the arrests made by police officers, the touchdowns scored by football players or the patents obtained by industrial companies, Augustine found that the top fifth of any group does about half the work, and the bottom half does about a fifth of the work. I suggest that this often makes it misleading to compare the average performance of one group with that of another. If your goal is to build a top-flight team, it's as least as important to know how bad the group's worst-case performers are likely to be.

Software development, for example, is striking in the gap between best and worst. Barry Boehm, in his landmark 1981 book "Software Engineering Economics," said it concisely: "All other factors being equal, a 90th-percentile team of analysts and programmers will be about four times as productive as a 15th-percentile team." To look at it another way, I'd say that hiring from anywhere but the top of the barrel looks like false economy: Even if it costs three times as much per man-hour to hire the best, it's likely to be a bargain.

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